Reply #58: cool analysis

[OnTheOtherHand]

I have a few caveats. The counties where Falk did worst relative to Doyle tend to be counties with not many voters. It's a mistake to fixate just on the largest counties, but it's also a mistake to focus on counties that take up a lot of space on the map but don't have much impact on the results. (I'm not saying that the blogger necessarily made that mistake, but the maps do tend to suck one in.)

Also, Falk actually did underperform more in Dane than in Milwaukee -- about a 9-point gap on the margin, vs. 5.

What I see at the reporting unit level is that the gap tends to be largest in reporting units (wards and ward combos) that are relatively balanced -- where Doyle got around 60% of the vote. Statewide, and especially in Dane and Milwaukee, Falk generally does fine in the most Democratic units, but as Doyle's vote share drops into the 40%-60% range, Falk's drops farther. (Statewide, there are a bunch of those "middling" units where Falk actually outperformed Doyle -- but in Dane and Milwaukee, almost none. I'm sure that some other counties are like Dane and Milwaukee in that respect; a media-market analysis may be spot on.) So, the "swing" voters seem to have been disproportionately in middling areas.

Kloppenburg vs. Barrett is a very different story. There, Kloppenburg underperforms most in most Democratic precincts of Milwaukee -- and that probably has a lot to do with the Supreme Court contest being nonpartisan on the ballot, as you pointed out.